Month: October, 2010

October 28, 2010

But you see, websites and hosting services should not be “fads” any more than forests and cities should be fads – they represent countless hours of writing, of editing, of thinking, of creating. They represent their time, and they represent the thoughts and dreams of people now much older, or gone completely. There’s history here. Real, honest, true history. So Archive Team did what it could, as well as other independent teams around the world, and some amount of Geocities was saved.

How much? We’ll never know. One of the Archive Team members called Yahoo! to find out the size and was rebuffed. When we called later in the year to ask exactly when the site was going down on October 26th, we were told that the person who spoke to us last had been let go. It must be like spring break down at that place.

But we know we got a bunch of Geocities sites – a significant percentage, especially of earlier, pre-acquisition data. We archived it as best we could, we compared notes, we merged and double-checked and did whatever needed to be done with what we happened to have.

So now, on this one-year anniversary, Archive Team announces that we are going to torrent it.

YES THAT IS RIGHT, WE ARE RELEASING GEOCITIES ON A TORRENT.

To be notified when the torrent is released, send an email to geotorrent@textfiles.com. Mash on the spinning molecule above to see the sort of beauty that has just been saved.

Foals – True Blood:

October 18, 2010

October 16, 2010

In a June NPR Intelligence Squared debate on the question, “Has the cyberwar threat been grossly exaggerated?” tech commenter Bruce Schneier argued there needs to be a better language to frame infosec issues:

If we frame this discussion as a war discussion, then what you do when there’s a threat of war is you call in the military and you get military solutions. You get lockdown; you get an enemy that needs to be subdued. If you think about these threats in terms of crime, you get police solutions. And as we have this debate, not just on stage, but in the country, the way we frame it, the way we talk about it; the way the headlines read, determine what sort of solutions we want, make us feel better. And so the threat of cyberwar is being grossly exaggerated and I think it’s being done for a reason. This is a power grab by government. What Mike McConnell didn’t mention is that grossly exaggerating a threat of cyberwar is incredibly profitable.

October 15, 2010

It took me two years before I realised who he was. He was just one of my son Marlon’s mates, hanging around the house playing guitar. I never ask Marlon’s mates who they are because, you know, ‘I’m a dope dealer.” Then one day I was at dinner and I’m like ‘Woah, Scissorhands.’